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Wednesday, May 16, 2018

New Feature: The Bookshelf

A year ago, as I was graduating from college, people kept
pestering me for a list of books that I would recommend reading.

I really don’t like it when people ask for that kind of
list.

When I recommend books, it’s not out of the blue. It’s in
the context of specific conversations with specific people. There are books I
am confident some of my friends would love that put others to sleep.

Gilead, for
example.

It’s one of my top 5 favorite books. It is rich and
beautiful and exquisitely written and conceived.

But there is very little plot.

So I know not to unreservedly recommend it to friends who
really care about plot-driven novels.

All of this to say: I don’t like handing out a list of books
I recommend, since I recommend different books to different people.

But enough people kept asking that I finally sat down to
write a simple list of books I’ve read and enjoyed. Title, then author. Next
book.

I couldn’t do it.

There was no way I could hand out a list of titles and
authors and be done with it. It drove me crazy that people would have no idea why I would recommend a particular book
or have any frame of reference for whether they might enjoy it or not.

Something had to be done.

I annotated it.

The list stretched to five pages of over 40 titles, with
comments for each of them. Some annotations were one line, others were more
like a paragraph.

I felt almost guilty when I gave this list of books to the
people who had asked for it. It seemed so over-the-top (annotations? really?). And long. Who needs to
add 40 books to their to-be-read list in one fell swoop??

But over the past year several people have remarked how much
they appreciated having it on hand. Furthermore, they say that the annotations
have been a helpful tool, not superfluous.

Since then, I’ve read probably 50 more books. And I have
things to say about most of them.

My friend Angela has been pestering me to post the
original list or something akin to it as a permanent page on this blog. And when Angela tells me to do something, I try to make a point of doing it, because she gives excellent advice.